Tuesday, November 17, 2009

In 2005, no one was using apps on their mobile phones. Those were the days of the Nokia Series 40 running J2ME. Developers making J2ME apps at that time were claiming that once mobile apps took off (any minute now!), they would be best positioned to take advantage of the new market.

Along came iPhone, Android, and most importantly, all-you-can-eat data plans. But where are those J2ME developers?

If you go through the Top 10 paid or Top 10 free apps on the App Store, you'll find that the companies there are either name brands (Walt Disney, Facebook, Adobe), or smaller development firms that were started recently: For example, ngmoco, founded 6/2008, or Limbic Software, founded 2008, and so on. I couldn't find an About page or Crunchbase profile for all of the companies, but the ones I found about all matched this pattern.

I was happy to learn that someone chose to take the quest for knowledge to its logical extreme: To read the Encyclopedia Brittanica from A-Z. The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs is a hilarious book. The author, a writer for Esquire magazine, spent over a year reading the 65k+ entries in the encyclopedia. Highly compressed and intermixed with his life in New York, it makes for an entertaining read. If you've spent significant chunks of your life surfing Wikipedia, this book is for you.

About Me

Gabor Cselle
San Francisco, CA

I work at Google, where I'm a Partner at Area 120. Previously, I worked at Twitter on trends, the logged-out homepage, and on MoPub. Twitter acquired our startup Namo Media in June 2014. Before Namo, I was a Product Manager at Google working on Google Now, Android and Gmail. I started reMail, a mobile email startup which was acquired by Google in February 2010.

Before reMail, I was the VP Engineering at Xobni, where we invented a popular plugin for Outlook, and a Software Engineer at Google. I have an MS degree in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

Views and opinions expressed here are mine and not those of my employer Google/Alphabet.